only men, but women,—­from whom dandified suits and superb silks seem to have departed during the present martial time.  Indeed, I heard that economy was the order of the day; that the fashionables of Charleston bought nothing new, partly because of the money pressure, and partly because the guns of Major Anderson might any day send the whole city into mourning; that patrician families had discharged their foreign cooks and put their daughters into the kitchen; that there were no concerts, no balls, and no marriages.  Even the volunteers exhibited little of the pomp and vanity of war.  The small French military cap was often the only sign of their present profession.  The uniform, when it appeared, was frequently a coarse homespun gray, charily trimmed with red worsted, and stained with the rains and earth of the islands.  One young dragoon in this sober dress walked into our hotel, trailing the clinking steel scabbard of his sabre across the marble floor of the vestibule with a warlike rattle which reminded me of the Austrian officers whom I used to see, yes, and hear, stalking about the cafe’s of Florence.  Half a dozen surrounded him to look at and talk about the weapon.  A portly, middle-aged legislator must draw it and cut and thrust, with a smile of boyish satisfaction between his grizzled whiskers, bringing the point so near my nose, in his careless eagerness, that I had to fall back upon a stronger, that is, a more distant position.  Then half a dozen others must do likewise, their eyes sparkling like those of children examining a new toy.

“It’s not very sharp,” said one, running his thumb carefully along the edge of the narrow and rather light blade.

“Sharp enough to cut a man’s head open,” averred the dragoon.

“Well, it’s a dam’ shame that sixty-five men tharr in Sumter should make such an expense to the State,” declared a stout, blonde young rifleman, speaking with a burr which proclaimed him from the up-country.  “We haven’t even troyed to get ’em out.  We ought at least to make a troyal.”

All strangers at Charleston walk to the Battery.  It is the extreme point of the city peninsula, its right facing on the Ashley, its left on the Cooper, and its outlook commanding the entire harbor, with Fort Sumter, Port Pinckney, Fort Moultrie, and Fort Johnstone in the distance.  Plots of thin clover, a perfect wonder in this grassless land; promenades, neatly fenced, and covered with broken shells instead of gravel; a handsome bronze lantern-stand, twenty-five feet high, meant for a beacon; a long and solid stone quay, the finest sea-walk in the United States; a background of the best houses in Charleston, three-storied and faced with verandas:  such are the features of the Battery.  Lately four large iron guns, mounted like field-pieces, form an additional attraction to boys and soldierly-minded men.  Nobody knew their calibre; the policemen who watched them could not say; the idlers who gathered about them disputed